


Power Shift

by Badwolf36



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, The Hale Fire, The Hale Pack - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2014-01-09
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Badwolf36/pseuds/Badwolf36
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alphas gain their power one of two ways. Derek doesn't know what took him so long to remember that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Power Shift

**Title:** Power Shift

 **F** **andom:** Teen Wolf

 **Author:** badwolf36

 **Rating:** PG-13

 **Characters:** Derek Hale, Laura Hale, flashbacks to Peter Hale, Cora Hale, and Talia Hale

 **Word count:** 2,272

 **Disclaimer:** I do not own Teen Wolf or any related properties.

 **Warnings:** Angst, hurt/comfort, mild spoilers for 3A.

 **Summary:** Alphas gain their power one of two ways. Derek doesn't know what took him so long to remember that.

 

 

He doesn’t understand the implication for a long time, too caught up in his own grief and guilt.

And then, one day as he’s walking down a crowded sidewalk in the evening on his way home, he catches sight of a woman that so resembles his mother that he’s almost caught up with her and pulled her back before her scent, the wrong one (not his mom’s, never again), hits him and pulls him up short.

His mother, his alpha, is gone.

Laura, his sister, is his alpha now.

He hears Peter’s words echoing in his head as he stands on the sidewalk, buffeted by the cruel wind and those who have no patience for a man frozen in the middle of the sidewalk.

It had been a history lesson for the younger kids that Derek had half been paying attention to as they all sat together in the large living room of the Hale home.

_“There’re three sides to a triskelion, which is our family symbol. Any wolf can rise, or fall, to the status of alpha, beta or omega.”_

_“So how do I get to be the alpha?” Cora pipes up from her spot on the floor, a haughty expression on her face. Derek snorts at her over the cover his “Sports Illustrated. Peter throws him a quelling glance, one that has him shutting up instantly. They were both betas, but Peter was the brother of the alpha, and older than Derek to boot._

_“Becoming an alpha usually means taking that power from someone else by force, sweetie,” Peter explains once he turns his attention back to Cora._

_“Killing them?” Cora asks, eyes wide; and Derek wonders if he should step in. They’re just kids after all, even if they do need to know this stuff._

_Peter nods solemnly, making sure he catches the eyes of each child in the room and Derek’s as well. “That’s the way it usually goes.”_

_“But Mom’s the alpha! I don’t want to kill Mom!” Cora shouts, jumping to her feet and brandishing the tiny claws that pop out of her fingers._

_“No one said you had to, Cora,” Laura says as she walks into the room and scoops Cora into her arms. She throws a glare Peter’s way, to which he holds up his hands in self-defen_ se, _before she strokes a hand over Cora’s hair in the same way their mom does. “Uncle Peter was just telling you that our kind operate by different rules. Nobody’s killing anybody. It’s just like Mom says ─ we’re predators, not killers, okay?”_

Derek stumbles into a nearby alleyway, clutching at his own leather-jacketed arms and struggling to breathe as he slams his back against the dirty brick. The memory of the night of the fire rushes at him with stunning clarity, as it always does.

_“Oh god,” Derek whispers, and he swears he can hears Kate’s laughter on the air._

_His home is engulfed in flames, black and orange and gray everywhere he looks. The smell is horrendous, ash and burning flesh and hair thick in the air._

_“Derek, for the love of god, move!” Laura yells at him. She’s already up on the porch, and one of her black leather boots is crashing into their front door over and over before he can join her._

_He throws his whole body into the door at the same time as one of her kicks and it bursts open. Tongues of flame rush out to greet them, and they have to throw themselves to either side of the doorway to avoid them. They wait for a moment, a lifetime, before rushing into the house. Laura darts upstairs, while Derek heads for the basement after checking that no one’s in the living room. The door is locked. He rips the door off its hinges in his desperation and finds Peter at the head of the stairs, burned almost beyond recognition._

_“Laura!” he screams, and she rushes to his side, helps him get Peter out into their front yard, where they had played hide-and-seek with their younger cousins the day before. Derek had thought it was dumb and that he was too old, but he’d bowed to his cousins’ wishes when they’d dog-piled him onto the ground, laughing and yelling._

_“Stay here with him!” Laura orders, rushing back into the house._

_Derek does as he’s told, clutching Peter’s body (they’d been so close once, before Paige, before his eyes had changed) to him as he waits. Peter’s face is like melted plastic and Derek doesn’t know why he isn’t healing. He should be healing. He’s strong. He should heal._

_He watches his home burn; commits the sight of each burst of flame and the sounds of popping timber and shattering glass to memory because he knows this is his fault. He hadn’t imagined Kate’s laughter. This_ is _his fault._

_When Laura comes back out of the house, he doesn’t need to be able to see the path the tears have tracked across her soot-stained face to know that there’s no one left alive. He can see that her clothes are burnt and stained as she comes close to him and Peter, her claws dark with something as well._

_Their family is dead and no amount of wishing can take that back. And god, he wishes he could take it back._

_This is his fault. He can hear sirens in the distance and it sticks in his mind that he has to tell Laura, has to let her know what he’s done, even if it means she kills him for it. He’ll welcome it if it means not having to live with the gaping hole that’s suddenly taken up residence in the place where his family, his pack, used to reside._

_“Laura, I…”_

_But he stops because his sister snarls “Quiet!” at him, her eyes flashing red. Alpha red._

_He snaps his jaws shut and doesn’t say another word, even through the paramedics pulling Peter from his arms, even through their frantic, fluttering questions and the police questioning that follows. He keeps his mouth shut when the fire marshal asks his questions too, even if he wants to say he knows who did it (Kate. Him? Kate? Him?). They all chalk it up to shock, a fugue state, and let him and Laura go, even though Derek was the one who had made it so they didn’t have a place to go home to._

He thinks he might be hyperventilating, but he’s not sure werewolves are even capable of that.

But the biological response is warranted because the reality of what had happened that night, the reason Laura’s eyes had changed from their soft gold to their searing red, is finally clear.

Laura had killed their mother and she’d used her claws to do it.

He stumbles back to their small apartment because he can’t think of anything else to do. He wants to ask her. He _needs_ to ask her.

_Was it mercy? Was it for the power?_

Then another question, one he only hopes she can answer: _Why hadn’t Talia Hale, an alpha respected by alphas, a woman who had power even when powerless, managed to find a way to get their family out alive?_

And another question, one not meant for Laura but for a woman with blonde hair who’d promised him dreams with laughing eyes and sinful lips: _Why didn’t you kill me, too?_

When Derek gets inside, Laura is looking suspiciously into a stainless steel pot she’s got perched on one of the stove’s tiny burners.

“I think I’ve managed to burn water,” she announces without looking up. “So we are probably going to have to go down to Franco’s Deli again if we want to eat tonight.”

But then she glances over and sees him collapsed against the door, sweating hard and shaking visibly. The wooden spoon she’s wielding clatters to the floor and she’s at his side in an instant, putting an arm around his shoulders as she guides him down to the floor.

“Derek, did someone find you? Find us?”

He shakes his head frantically. It’s always a concern. There will always be hunters. There will always be those who don’t follow The Code, just as there are werewolves who choose to be killers.

He reaches his hand up again, clawing at his chest in an all too literal manner until his shirt and flesh shred beneath his onslaught. It’s a feeble effort to encourage some air into his lungs and the pain is grounding, even if it stings terribly.

“Stop that,” Laura commands, grabbing his hand as her eyes change color just the tiniest bit. Derek stills, feeling like the bunny he stalked through the woods for fun once when he was 8. The thing had frozen in the same way he does now, completely and utterly. He sort of feels sympathy for that bunny now.

“La…ura,” he says, the name choked from him. He wants to ask. He wants to. Those crimson eyes used to belong to his mom, their mom, and Laura had stolen them (had to steal them? Been forced to? It wouldn’t have surprised him if his mom had asked her to do it, just as Paige had asked him to kill her.).

“Oh god,” Laura says suddenly, gathering him close, his blood-stained hand still held in hers. “Okay, you’re fine. We’re okay. They’re taking care of Peter and they think he might pull out of it one day. We’re good. We’re together. That’s all that matters, okay? I love you.”

Derek jerks in her arms, but Laura just pulls him in tighter. “Whatever you’re thinking about, you have to let it go. The past is behind us now. We have to keep going. That’s the promise we made, remember?

“I…I remember,” he says slowly. He sits up a little, pressing the back of his head into the door. Laura squeezes his hand.

“We’ll be okay, little brother.”

“Don’t call me little,” he says, although the familiar complaint has none of its former heat.

He wants to ask her. More than that, he wants to tell her, finally, about what really happened that night, what he’d done that had led to the death of their family.

But there’s a pot boiling over on the stove, and Laura warm and alive (still alive) at his side, and blood on his nails and too much noise in his ears.

He slumps against her side a little and takes a breath. He squeezes Laura’s hand back (were these the nails that had turned into claws and slit their mother’s throat? The ones covered in blue nail polish that he had painted on because Laura had insisted it was a bonding activity for him to give her a manicure?) and leans his head against hers.

“We’re pack, Derek. We’ll be okay.”

He closes his eyes and doesn’t open them again as Laura eventually shifts them forward and guides him to his bed. She comes back to him after shutting off the stove and curls her body around his.

“Derek?” she asks, resting her palm over his bicep. “Will you look at me?”

He doesn’t want to. Can’t stand to see that awful red in his sister’s eyes and know what it means.

But his mother’s words come back to him again as they’ve done so often lately, sometimes recriminating, sometimes loving, sometimes angry, but always with that same steadiness she displayed in every part of her life.

_“My eyes, they’re different,” he says, afraid to open them and show his mother the color that marks him as a murderer, marks him as someone who has taken an innocent life._

_“Different,” his mother says as she grasps his chin with one of her warm, strong hands, “but still beautiful. Just like the rest of you.”_

Derek opens his eyes and looks at Laura, his older sister, and her red, red eyes, luminescent in the dark of the room. And he thinks that maybe they’re not a burning, searing red after all, but the warm crimson color of autumn leaves. He also thinks that that they remind him of something, someone, else.

“You look like Mom,” he whispers before he ducks his face into Laura’s collarbone and inhales the clean forest scent of her under the lingering grime of the city that tends to settle around them every day like a blanket. “She would have been proud of you.”

He means it, too. No matter how she got the power, he thinks their mom would be proud of the alpha Laura has become.

Derek feels Laura’s heartbeat speed up for a moment before she huffs and strokes a hand through his hair. He hears her start to say something once, twice, before she gives up and brings him in a little closer, sitting up briefly to grab the blanket at the foot of the bed and drag it over the both of them as she lays back down.

“Good night, little brother,” she whispers.

“Good night, exceedingly old sister,” he whispers back and smiles for the first time in a long time as Laura laughs and hits him on the shoulder.

They’re different, but they’re still family. With Laura as an alpha and Derek as her beta, they’re still pack as well. And right now, even with secrets and confessions and other unsaid words between them, that’s enough for Derek. He takes a breath, lets it out, and takes another one with lungs that feel just a little bit less tight. And then, with his alpha beside him doing the same, he keeps breathing.

 


End file.
